


Ne'er been broken-hearted

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Bars and Pubs, M/M, POV Alternating, Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 16:31:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7230121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few days after the end of the novel's action, Ralph and Alec meet and (don't) talk (very much at all). </p><p>*</p><p>Note: period-typical homophobia, canon-typical effeminophobia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ne'er been broken-hearted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tree_and_leaf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tree_and_leaf/gifts).



> To tree_and_leaf's prompt: Alec, Ralph -- 'things you didn't say at all.'

Ralph had been to this pub—a narrow, ugly building: raw red and yellow brick outside, gouged plasterwork and dented panelling within—with Laurie, not more than a fortnight before. It hadn’t been a queer haunt then, but it was now. He wondered, not for the first time, how these infiltrations occurred. No-one led them; they were barely even articulated: at most _oh dear no, no-one goes _there_ any more; the Fox_ (or the Armada, the Artichoke, the Grapes, the Crown and Cushion) _is the place these days._ Sometimes a landlord, fearing for his licence, ended the dalliance, but usually it simply yet mysteriously dissolved, a macrocosm of the affairs it facilitated. The regulars rarely seemed to perceive the temporary occupation, as if they were a convoy labouring through fog, oblivious to the small craft that had materialised alongside. One or two patrons might belong to either population: that rating with the minotaur brow above insolent eyes, for example. But there was no such thing as dual citizenship.

Picking his way around a merry group who, conversing animatedly in the accents of Pontypool or Pontypridd, had let their shopping spill into the space between tables, Alec was obliged to expend a bright, discouraging smile and wave upon a brittle clique positioned between the fireplace and the bay window—friends of Sandy’s, or friends of Sandy’s friends; a distinction as immaterial to Sandy as it was absolute to him. Had they spotted Ralph, loafing against one of the bar’s supporting pillars, head tilted back as he smoked, exposing a slightly surprising length of vulnerable throat? Either answer seemed improbable: he looked at once like a fixture and like a ghost, as if he’d already been here when the place was built, and its various clientele had ebbed and flowed about him for seventy years. 

‘Hullo, Ralph. Sorry I’m late.’ 

Ralph lowered his head, drawing on an expression of pleasant, outgoing courtesy as one might a balaclava helmet. 

‘Quite all right. I know how it is. Drink?’ 

‘Let me. Same again?’ 

‘No, least I can do.’ Ralph’s forestalling gesture became a signal to the barmaid. ‘I wanted to apologise properly. I should have known you wouldn’t—another pink gin, please, a large one, and—’ 

‘Oh—a pint of bitter.’ 

‘If you’re sure.’ 

‘Yes. I can only stay for one. Dallow picked up some slack for me when—I mean, I’m repaying a favour.’ 

Ralph raised an appraising eyebrow. Alec’s complexion, always sallow, had taken a distinct turn towards jaundice, and his eyes, which were the sort that wore dark circles well, now also bore bags. ‘What’d you hock to afford it?’ 

‘I’d let myself hope it wasn’t _quite_ as bad as all that.’ 

‘Daresay I’ve looked better myself,’ Ralph said. The barmaid put their drinks on the bar and he handed her a ten-shilling note. Alec saw that what he had taken for a quirk of the light was the greenish residue of a fairly livid bruise on Ralph’s left cheekbone. Ralph raised his glass. ‘Happy days.’ 

‘You’ve been through it a bit.’ 

‘We all have. Look, as I was saying. I owe you an apology. I can’t think how I imagined you’d betray a confidence. And, I owe you—’ Ralph did not say _my life_ , though he shrewdly suspected it, for how could one? ‘And thanks.’ 

‘Don’t talk nonsense. I’m only sorry I couldn’t—’ Alec did not say _leave Sandy, because I knew I could bear his death better than I could yours, and feared what that meant, what that made me_ , because how could one possibly? ‘I couldn’t meet you before this. The telephone's no good.’ He offered his cigarettes. 

Ralph accepted one and a light with a nod. ‘Did you see Laurie before he was discharged from hospital?’ He collected his change from the bar. 

‘Yes.’ Alec said and nearly continued, _he contrived to forget all about his married sister’s illness in front of Matron. I had to pretend it was my wires that were crossed_ , for Ralph surely knew from whom Laurie had secured his pass that night, and it might have eased things, to acknowledge what had happened with affectionate reference to Laurie’s unwariness, which Alec could now choose to find more charming than exasperating. But the moment passed, and he said instead, ‘He said he was going to stay with his people for a few days.’ 

‘His mother wanted to see him, naturally. And there’s the question of digs, until he goes up.’ He almost allowed himself to say _Christ, Alec, how can I let him stick with me out of pity?_ But of course he did not. 

‘I’ll let you know if I hear of anything, if you like. The common-room's fairly good for that.’ 

‘That’s kind of you. I’m sure I could take the room for another month. But it’s a frowsty hole.’ 

Alec marvelled that he had borne it for a single night, after _that_ night. But for Ralph the place must contain more sweet memories than bitter, and his extraordinary sentimentality where Laurie was concerned seemed to permit a peculiar clarity of thought; a discrete separation of happiness from its opposite. 

‘Don’t be hard on yourself, Ralph. You were treated abominably.’ Alec swallowed some more beer. It was a rather magnificently indifferent brew. ‘By Bunny, I mean,’ he added, uneasily aware that with the clarification he had betrayed his unspoken thought, _by Laurie too_. 

‘That’s settled now.’ Ralph meant this; all had been closed in a display of aggression that he had very quickly come to see as intrinsic to the self-destructiveness that he must renounce. Ashamed alike of the premeditated brutality he had used upon Bunny and its ludicrously chivalrous motivation, he minded less that he had made a Quixote of himself than that he had installed Laurie as his Dulcinea; that mustn’t happen again. There was no way to say any of this, even to Alec. He stubbed out the cigarette. 

‘If you’re ever stuck, you’re always welcome to doss down—’ 

This was too much even for Ralph’s self-restraint. ‘That, my dear, sounds like the old duodenal ulcer dodge transferred to private life.’ 

‘The _what_?’ 

‘Duodenal ulcers. The Navy takes them very seriously. It would be rather messy if one blew up at sea, if you think about it. So if you actually _want_ to be put ashore—’ 

Tension formed, iridescent and elastic like a huge soap bubble, then burst into mutual laughter. 

‘Actually,’ Alec said, ‘not. I made a clean breast of a few things,’ no need to say when; perhaps Laurie had let that slip, anyway. ‘There was a bit of a _mauvais quart d’heure_ —well, more a _mauvais quart de jour_ , to be honest—at first, but it’s been a lot easier since.’ 

‘Yes, I can see that. It’s not usually the demand for exclusive rights that makes for jealousy. It’s the fear of being—’ Ralph thought _unloved_ and said, ‘Alone.’ 

Seeing the effort, the conscious generosity to self and others that had gone into this admission, Alec felt an inconvenient surge of desire: had they been somewhere private, he might have confessed it, not in hope of its fulfilment, but something like the opposite, a testament to intimacy and irrevocability. 

‘Another?’ Ralph asked. He had already caught the barmaid’s eye. 

‘Hell. A half. But then I really must go. I’m cutting it fine already.’ 

_One of these days_ , Ralph thought, _probably not until this lousy war is over, we might have the time to get properly, forgettingly blind, divulge it all into an alcoholic void._ He said, ‘Same again.’ 

Alec acquiesced, unwilling to be the man who ordered a half when it was his round: it was a respectable ninety minutes, nearly, before he was on duty again. He came from a family which had believed strongly in talking it all out, but it was astonishing how little relief disclosure brought, how little use it really was. He thought of the psychoanalytic journals that were his least reprehensible guilty pleasure, and suppressed an ironic grin. But reserve, a third _vice anglais_ , was of no great utility either: look where it had got him, had got Ralph and Laurie, had got—he tried, for the first time since hearing Toto’s incoherent tirade, to imagine the orderly boy, Andrew, Andrew Raynes. Perhaps that was the great tragedy of the thing: that they had never met.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Burns' song 'Ae Fond Kiss'. The relevant lines are:
>
>> Had we never lov'd sae kindly,  
> Had we never lov'd sae blindly,  
> Never met, or never parted,  
> We had ne'er been broken-hearted.  
> 
> 
> 'the Armada, the Artichoke, the Grapes, the Crown and Cushion': all actual pubs in Bristol in 1940, most of them destroyed in the Bristol Blitz, though I confess I didn't research the likelihood of any of them having a substantial gay clientele. 
> 
> 'quart de jour': lit. 'a quarter of a day', idiomatically, 'day shift.'


End file.
